What Happened to Compromise?

WASHINGTON - ON the second floor of the Capitol, in an ornate chamber where senators greet visitors, the stern visage of Henry Clay peers out from a gilded frame. Clay, of course, was the Great Compromiser, and for a moment last week it was possible to imagine his ghost hovering in the corridors.

First 14 senators struck a bipartisan compromise to avert a showdown on President Bush's judicial nominees. Next, Republicans and Democrats in the House passed a bill expanding federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, only to run into a threatened presidential veto. Then Democrats revived the filibuster -- the tactic at the heart of the judicial fight -- to delay the confirmation of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.

As suddenly as the spirit of Clay had revived, it vanished. Left behind was a question: What has happened to the art of political compromise?

American democracy was founded on compromise. The Senate itself is the product of a deal; its design, with two votes for every state, was an offer the framers felt compelled to make during the Constitutional Convention to draw less populated states into the union.

For James Madison and other delegates from large states like Virginia, "the great compromise," as it came to be known, was "not a compromise at all, it was a defeat," said Gordon Wood, a professor of American history at Brown University. "The Virginia delegation caucused and wondered whether they should just walk out of the convention."

Instead, he said, they stayed on because "without a compromise there would have been no union."

That sense, that the stakes are high and the republic is at risk, has been central to the most important compromises in the nation's history, and it was palpable in the Senate last week.

"It's been a remarkable study of Senate history and the history of our country," said Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican, of working out a deal to forestall the so-called nuclear option on judicial nominees. He was guided, he said, by the question: "What would happen in the Senate if the nuclear option were done?"

But as Clay knew, compromise is never easy, and it may not last. His Missouri Compromise, in permitting Missouri to enter the union as a slave state and Maine to enter as a non-slave state, lasted 30 years but could not stave off the Civil War.

These days, political analysts and lawmakers alike cite many reasons for the absence of compromise: the vanishing center in politics, the 24-hour news cycle, the unrelenting pressure from interest groups.

But despite all that, Congress still regularly reaches compromise on issues like military spending and highway appropriations. In the turmoil in the Senate last week, the Energy Committee approved a broad energy bill almost unanimously, after years of disagreement. And the Judiciary Committee, which has split along party lines on so many of Mr. Bush's nominees, agreed on a plan to compensate victims of asbestos exposure, another long-stalled measure.

"Those are areas on which compromise has always been possible and always will be," said Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. But, he added, "You can't split the difference on values, and that's what's driving a lot of the polarization today."

The increasing prominence of religion in politics is adding passion and moral certainty to issues like embryonic stem cell research and the judiciary, where the struggles over abortion and gay marriage are playing out. Christian conservatives say they are fighting to preserve a "culture of life," while the left accuses the right of trying to impose its morality on the nation. Both sides demand that politicians not give into the heretics.

That was also the case in the decades leading up to the Civil War, scholars said.

"There was this very strong ideology of pro-slavery as being a very Christian and very beneficent thing for both whites and blacks," said David S. Reynolds, the author of a new biography of John Brown. Similarly, Northern abolitionists viewed slavery as the devil's work.

Passions ran so high that by the late 1850's, Mr. Reynolds said, "one newspaper reporter said the only people in Congress who are not carrying a revolver are those carrying two revolvers."

By that time Clay was dead. But in the three decades before his death in 1852, he used his clout as speaker of the House, secretary of state and a senator to stave off war, said Robert V. Remini, a Clay biographer who is historian of the House of Representatives.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to compromise in modern politics, Mr. Remini and other historians said, is the absence of a leader with the gift for compromise and the determination to make it happen.

"Gosh, I don't think of anybody who has the muscle to undertake a compromise," said Edmund S. Morgan, a prominent historian of early America.

The last Congressional leader to have that muscle was Lyndon B. Johnson, who was able to forge a compromise on civil rights -- the modern-day equivalent of the fight over slavery -- when he engineered the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Robert A. Caro, a Johnson biographer, said Johnson overcame differences that were far more polarizing than those of today.

"No matter how irreconcilable they say differences are now, just think of the 1950's when the South said, 'Never,"' Mr. Caro said. Of Johnson, he added, "He threatened, he cajoled, he did whatever he had to fashion a compromise and make it be accepted by the Senate. There was a savage will to get it done."

That kind of will was lacking among Senate leaders during the impasse over judges, leading the so-called gang of 14 to step in. They did so partly out of high-minded concern for the Senate, but self-interest was also at work; polls show Americans are tired of the nasty partisanship. A survey this month by the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of people believe the parties are bickering more than usual; in 2002, the figure was 31 percent. And just 35 percent approved of the job Republican leaders in Congress are doing.

"There is general nervousness about the disapproval ratings," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican. "More and more Americans are saying, 'Hey, I'm paying two and a half bucks for a gallon of gas, and you guys are fighting over something that we don't know what it means, the filibuster."'

Some find that talk encouraging; Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, says the art of compromise will return only when those who don't engage in it are "punished at the polls."

But while the architects of last week's deal are pleased with themselves -- "We have kept the republic," Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, declared -- people on both sides agree that the deal may have put off until tomorrow a fight that would otherwise have occurred today.

"Well," said Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader, asked about Mr. Byrd's remark, "you keep it for a day, and you've got to fight again to keep it for the next day."

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 4, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: THE NATION: HARDBALL; The Elusive Middle Ground. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe